If you hate a merchant and want to stick it to them in your own petty way, don't refund a transaction, just charge it back. That way, no matter what the outcome is, they'll have to pay a non-refundable chargeback fee.
By the way, if you issue a refund with a normal merchant, they will not refund the transaction fee and in fact you will pay a second transaction fee for the refund! Only Paypal will refund the transaction fee.
In other words, what Apple is doing is the industry norm. Their transaction cost is higher than a merchant, but it isn't their fault your product sucks--all they do is manage your store.
Was that open source projects could use "cloud computing" to quickly compile packages and test them on every configuration they support. No need to keep a bunch of servers running idle most of the time. Turn on "Freebsd 6.2 i386", compile all the ports as packages, turn it off. Turn on "Freebsd 6.3, x64 SMP", compile them as packages, turn it off. Turn on "Freebsd 7.0 Sparc64", compile, turn off. Repeat for every supported configuration.
No need to purchase and maintain separate build servers running every configuration. Just keep separate images, shove them into the cloud, and cook up some spiffy scripts to turn them on and off when required.
It makes a damn lot of sense too. If you were smart, you could hook it so that every time there was a new commit, a script would fire up a batch of servers and rebuild whatever package was changed.
Haters?
Yes. People who hate something without understanding what it is they hate.
Either Amazon gets to do it, or more likely, VMWare will do it. VMWare as a vested interest in making sure they can import just about every virtual machine image under the sun.
If you are worried about privacy and data security, why would you trust any host? Nothing about "cloud computing" makes things any less private or secure. If you don't trust your host running a rack of your leased servers, why would you trust them with anything else?
Why are so many distributions still maintaining their own compile farms? Why not just fire up a pool of servers on EC2 and use http://distcc.samba.org/ to build all the RMS/YUM's/Packages/Whatever? Why not just fire up a bunch of extra web servers in the cloud when you push out a new release of your distribution? It is probably way cheaper than getting donated hardware and hosting.
Hell if all you haters were smart, you'd be pressuring the FSF to have its own "cloud" that GPL users could tap into as a compiler/testing farm. Your open source project could just fire up a server that is running your testing image and use it to create binaries or run automated tests.
For starters, you will not run your HIPAA compliant health care system or your damn investment bank datacenter using some random shmucks pool of servers. That is silly. Privacy issues aside, both systems probably have very predictable loads and wouldn't benefit from cloud computing.
Second, even if you did, you'll probably be able to specify which data centers your virtual machines will run. After all, they want to charge you more for running stuff overseas!
Third, you aren't the market. Startups and web companies with spikey traffic are. If you have a predictable amount of traffic, odds are good this kind of provisioning would cost more. But if you are prone to unpredictable spikes, or you just don't want to deal with maintaining your own equipment, this is probably a good deal.
Lastly, just because RMS says something is evil, doesn't mean he is right. I'll just leave it at that. I know you didn't specify the keyword "RMS", but rest assured that there are a lot of "haters" who have never even heard of the term before that windbag piped up. Now they hate it without even knowing what it means (kinda like how RMS hates it without understanding it).
Since those that would and can pay for it will not take advantage of it.
This statement makes no sense. You take advantage of it by *not* using it. That is the point. You only pay for what you use and no more. Prior to cloud computing (okay, the term is kinda silly), you'd have to provision for your peak load. Now you just provision for your baseline and fire up a potentially infinite pool of servers during peak loads.
First, the "cloud" doesn't run on anything. The "cloud" is basically a metaphor for an virtually infinite amount of servers you can fire up running your system image at once. It doesn't mean your instances are "floating" around a pool of servers--those images are running on real servers in some dudes rack and each running instance is indeed mapped to one server. If the physical server your instance is running on dies, oh well, you just fire up your image somewhere else. If you looked in the data center, you'd just see a bunch of regular servers running something like VMWare ESX (or whatever) and a bunch of fancy scripts to load and provision customer's images across the data center. You'd probably also see some serious SAN shit too.
All your instances typically connect to the same pool of shared, perminate storage. Each instance (at least on EC2) gets a couple hundred gigs of temporary disk space that goes away when you shut down that instance.
With Amazons EC2 (the only one I've played with), you can shove anything into your disk images has long as it is x64 or x86. "Anything" could be Windows Server, Linux, Sun, FreeBSD, whatever. You can download a lot of pre-build images from the community too--like "here is FreeBSD/w useful stuff already installed".
The trick right now is everybody has different ways to fire up said images. And once they are fired up, the API's your software must interact with are different. One guys way of provisioning an IP address or mounting a disk is different than another.
But this is to be expected. The whole industry is far to young to ask for standards.
and benefit is that you can easily add more servers and turn them off when you are done with them
If all you could do is turn them on, the whole thing would be pointless and you might as well go back to owning your own infrastructure. The cost savings comes from being able to pay only for what you use, no more, no less.
It is 9/11 and slashdot was hammered. I am too lazy to cite, but they were shoving extra computers into the rack to keep the thing online (slashdot was pretty much the only place that wasn't hammered). With cloud computing, they'd just fire up as many extra servers as the load needs and turn them all off when they are done.
Dailykos. Election night. Rather than buying a shit-ton more hardware to handle such peak loads, they'd just fire up as many extra "computers" as they need and pay for like 24 hours of use.
Your Blog. Slashdot, Digg, Fark and New York Times link to your article about Captain Kirk. Too much traffic? Nonsense... fire up a pool of servers in the cloud and turn them off when you are done!
You don't have to maintain infrastructure to deal with your peak loads. You just have to keep enough to handle the baseline and than when you get hammered, you "turn on" more "computers" as you go. In theory, those "computers" could be located anywhere, so if you are mentioned on some UK news show and get hammered over there, you can "turn on" more of your "computers" to handle the load and turn them off when you are done.
In other words, basically, you have an infinite amount of computers which start almost instantly that you pay by the hour/minute for. Each of them boots off a standard image you control and all of the service providers have ways to script things like "hey, I've just been booted! lets tell the load balancer to add me to the pool!"
In yet other words, it is basically like a distributed virtual server. Take a single image and on-demand, load up as many virtual servers as you need.
Is let me import my damn VMWare image. That or get VMWare to suck down their images. Then I could run an instance of my machines locally. Really, aren't all these things basically nothing more than fancy ISO files?
But maybe you and I are both thinking too low level. "High level" would be dealing with what is *on* the virtual machines, not the images themselves. Then you are talking things like IP configuration, where crap is on the disk, etc...
Or maybe I'm just full of it. But I was surprised that nobody has offered a way to suck these things into VMWare Workstation.
The HTTP-Referer isn't designed for ?ref=somesource
Your stat software wants to know if more people click to your page through the logo ?ref=mylogo or through a link in the story ?ref=story. The Referer can't give you that info.
The HTTP-Referer also is no good for aggregation. It only give you a URL. If you didn't append something like ?campaign=longurl, it would be almost impossible to track things like ad-campaigns.
HTTP-Referers *are* good for dealing with myspace image leeches. If you haven't I suggest you read thorough you log files right now--I bet you'll find 20% of your traffic is myspace idiots leeching your images. Redirect those guys to something more... tasteful, and enjoy the bandwidth savings.
...except they aren't using mod_gzip/deflate. At first I thought you browsed the web RMS style and maybe wc* didn't support compression** and you were just getting what you deserved***, but then I checked in firefox and lo and behold:
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:39:54 GMT Server: Apache P3P: policyref="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="CAO DSP COR CURa ADMa DEVa TAIa PSAa PSDa CONi OUR NOR IND PHY ONL UNI COM NAV INT DEM STA PRE" Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html
200 OK No compression!
If they had been using compression, it would have made all that whitespace fairly negligible.
Probably a result of how their template system stitches everything together. Still, that is pretty bad. There is no excuse to run a webserver and not turn on compression. It is the single biggest way to boost page-load and decrease bandwidth.
* wget 4 lyfe! ** compression is probably evil and Anti-Freedom(tm) somehow, kinda like images are evil or fads like "graphical user interfaces" are evil. In otherwords,anything that makes things easier or faster for a user is basically evil and Anti-Freedom****. *** braindead comment spamming bots are the only thing not using compression (except RMS, probably) **** I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to deduce if I'm serious. Hint: no hint.
The odds of your unactivated card falling into the hands of somebody who has the ability to modify the Caller ID info is most likely pretty slim.
And having a card fall into the hands of somebody spoofing Caller ID to activate them means said person is doing some serious criminal shit. In other words, having the card activated is the least of anybody's worry.
In other words, security is a balance. Activating your card from a "home phone" just weeds out casual criminals who stumble on your mail--not hard-core people doing this shit for a living.
Honestly, I always thought of "previews" and stuff as a cop-out way to avoid the trouble of implementing a 30-minute edit feature.
In theory, I could preview the post I'm about to make, but in truth, I'll just blast right through it.
Besides, previews and "reading the entire email before sending" doesn't catch the same kinds of errors as reading it after a minute or so. After you forget about writing it, your brain can spot mistakes easier.
But yeah, for the super-ultra-important email? Read it once through. Anything else? Honestly they are going to skim the email just as quickly...nobody reads more than a few sentences of most emails anyway.
What is the point about censoring the location where you are firing off a minigun
Because they don't want a bunch of damn tourists driving by that location every day taking pictures on their i-Androids and "tweeting" all their idiot friends on Buttbook (Facebook 2.0). You could just see the insipid blog posts now:
OMG--this is where Adam and Jamie blew up that dead cow in episode 502
OMG--look, there is Adam's towel boy eating a HoHo.
OMG--Adam was soooooo embarrassed when I pointed out the well known fact that in in episode 103 he was clearly wearing his watch in scene 59 and when they cut to scene 60, his watch was off!!
OMG--here is Jamie giving me his signature while I tell him about the time I took Mentos and put them in my moms dishwasher too see what would happen!! He seemed rather impressed when I mentioned the fact that dishwashers were designed to withstand this kind of thing. He said they might use my advice in an upcoming episode even.
OMG--Here is me and Adam talking about how his calculations in episode E4024 were all wrong because he didnt use the Dimondium-Tilite Transform to convert everything into imaginary numbers first. I mean, everybody knows to do that, right? *snort* *snort*.
OMG--I asked Jamie why he never used my dishwasher/mentos advice when they put squirrels down their pants in episode 803 to see what would happen. Jamie said they ran out of time! What a jerk!
Once you get the geek tourists, you get the geek signatures, you get geek idiots trying to help out, you get the pedantic geek idiots trying to outsmart them, and you get armchair geek idiots trying to act chummy with the hosts of the show.
Basically, if they gave the location of where they did this stuff, it would become too infested with geek idiots to ever use it again.
Not saying the name is Torvalds attempt at saving grace
Is the person responsible going to pull a classic political step-down where they resign "in order to spend more time with their family"?
Maybe it was Hans Reiser? Sure the guy is locked up in San Quentin, but nobody knows how to hack a filesystem to bits better than Reiser. Bada ba ching! Thank you, thank you... I'll be here all night.
Know that people aren't always aware they can't ask these kinds of questions. You are also free to disclose any of it, like your age, even if they don't ask (many people disclose their age on their resume and don't even realize it. Never add the date when you graduated from high school.)
The key here is that if an employer bases their hiring decision on the fact you served in Vietnam, they are in the wrong. If they didn't hire you as a programmer because you are 45, they are wrong. If they didn't hire you as some hot-shot because you have kids, they are wrong.
Gzip/Deflate only do so much man. Minifying your javascript also shrinks down variable names, removes spaces... Minify + Gzip/Deflate Gzip/Deflate only
For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
The guy is basically a throwback to the "good old days" of computing, and quite frankly, his actions make me think he wishes we'd all go back in time with him.
Slashdot Mirror
If you hate a merchant and want to stick it to them in your own petty way, don't refund a transaction, just charge it back. That way, no matter what the outcome is, they'll have to pay a non-refundable chargeback fee.
By the way, if you issue a refund with a normal merchant, they will not refund the transaction fee and in fact you will pay a second transaction fee for the refund! Only Paypal will refund the transaction fee.
In other words, what Apple is doing is the industry norm. Their transaction cost is higher than a merchant, but it isn't their fault your product sucks--all they do is manage your store.
Was that open source projects could use "cloud computing" to quickly compile packages and test them on every configuration they support. No need to keep a bunch of servers running idle most of the time. Turn on "Freebsd 6.2 i386", compile all the ports as packages, turn it off. Turn on "Freebsd 6.3, x64 SMP", compile them as packages, turn it off. Turn on "Freebsd 7.0 Sparc64", compile, turn off. Repeat for every supported configuration.
No need to purchase and maintain separate build servers running every configuration. Just keep separate images, shove them into the cloud, and cook up some spiffy scripts to turn them on and off when required.
It makes a damn lot of sense too. If you were smart, you could hook it so that every time there was a new commit, a script would fire up a batch of servers and rebuild whatever package was changed.
Yes. People who hate something without understanding what it is they hate.
Either Amazon gets to do it, or more likely, VMWare will do it. VMWare as a vested interest in making sure they can import just about every virtual machine image under the sun.
If you are worried about privacy and data security, why would you trust any host? Nothing about "cloud computing" makes things any less private or secure. If you don't trust your host running a rack of your leased servers, why would you trust them with anything else?
I bet you are right. Hundred bucks says the HTML for the textbox where you change your templates has a couple newlines in it. SOmething like:
[textarea] ... some extra newlines.... .... some extra newlines...
{$OLD_TEMPLATE}
[/textarea]
Sorry I couldn't make that more clear, but slashdot would have ate the HTML (moreso than it already has)
Why are so many distributions still maintaining their own compile farms? Why not just fire up a pool of servers on EC2 and use http://distcc.samba.org/ to build all the RMS/YUM's/Packages/Whatever? Why not just fire up a bunch of extra web servers in the cloud when you push out a new release of your distribution? It is probably way cheaper than getting donated hardware and hosting.
Hell if all you haters were smart, you'd be pressuring the FSF to have its own "cloud" that GPL users could tap into as a compiler/testing farm. Your open source project could just fire up a server that is running your testing image and use it to create binaries or run automated tests.
For starters, you will not run your HIPAA compliant health care system or your damn investment bank datacenter using some random shmucks pool of servers. That is silly. Privacy issues aside, both systems probably have very predictable loads and wouldn't benefit from cloud computing.
Second, even if you did, you'll probably be able to specify which data centers your virtual machines will run. After all, they want to charge you more for running stuff overseas!
Third, you aren't the market. Startups and web companies with spikey traffic are. If you have a predictable amount of traffic, odds are good this kind of provisioning would cost more. But if you are prone to unpredictable spikes, or you just don't want to deal with maintaining your own equipment, this is probably a good deal.
Lastly, just because RMS says something is evil, doesn't mean he is right. I'll just leave it at that. I know you didn't specify the keyword "RMS", but rest assured that there are a lot of "haters" who have never even heard of the term before that windbag piped up. Now they hate it without even knowing what it means (kinda like how RMS hates it without understanding it).
This statement makes no sense. You take advantage of it by *not* using it. That is the point. You only pay for what you use and no more. Prior to cloud computing (okay, the term is kinda silly), you'd have to provision for your peak load. Now you just provision for your baseline and fire up a potentially infinite pool of servers during peak loads.
First, the "cloud" doesn't run on anything. The "cloud" is basically a metaphor for an virtually infinite amount of servers you can fire up running your system image at once. It doesn't mean your instances are "floating" around a pool of servers--those images are running on real servers in some dudes rack and each running instance is indeed mapped to one server. If the physical server your instance is running on dies, oh well, you just fire up your image somewhere else. If you looked in the data center, you'd just see a bunch of regular servers running something like VMWare ESX (or whatever) and a bunch of fancy scripts to load and provision customer's images across the data center. You'd probably also see some serious SAN shit too.
All your instances typically connect to the same pool of shared, perminate storage. Each instance (at least on EC2) gets a couple hundred gigs of temporary disk space that goes away when you shut down that instance.
With Amazons EC2 (the only one I've played with), you can shove anything into your disk images has long as it is x64 or x86. "Anything" could be Windows Server, Linux, Sun, FreeBSD, whatever. You can download a lot of pre-build images from the community too--like "here is FreeBSD /w useful stuff already installed".
The trick right now is everybody has different ways to fire up said images. And once they are fired up, the API's your software must interact with are different. One guys way of provisioning an IP address or mounting a disk is different than another.
But this is to be expected. The whole industry is far to young to ask for standards.
If all you could do is turn them on, the whole thing would be pointless and you might as well go back to owning your own infrastructure. The cost savings comes from being able to pay only for what you use, no more, no less.
Here are two excellent use cases:
It is 9/11 and slashdot was hammered. I am too lazy to cite, but they were shoving extra computers into the rack to keep the thing online (slashdot was pretty much the only place that wasn't hammered). With cloud computing, they'd just fire up as many extra servers as the load needs and turn them all off when they are done.
Dailykos. Election night. Rather than buying a shit-ton more hardware to handle such peak loads, they'd just fire up as many extra "computers" as they need and pay for like 24 hours of use.
Your Blog. Slashdot, Digg, Fark and New York Times link to your article about Captain Kirk. Too much traffic? Nonsense... fire up a pool of servers in the cloud and turn them off when you are done!
You don't have to maintain infrastructure to deal with your peak loads. You just have to keep enough to handle the baseline and than when you get hammered, you "turn on" more "computers" as you go. In theory, those "computers" could be located anywhere, so if you are mentioned on some UK news show and get hammered over there, you can "turn on" more of your "computers" to handle the load and turn them off when you are done.
In other words, basically, you have an infinite amount of computers which start almost instantly that you pay by the hour/minute for. Each of them boots off a standard image you control and all of the service providers have ways to script things like "hey, I've just been booted! lets tell the load balancer to add me to the pool!"
In yet other words, it is basically like a distributed virtual server. Take a single image and on-demand, load up as many virtual servers as you need.
Is let me import my damn VMWare image. That or get VMWare to suck down their images. Then I could run an instance of my machines locally. Really, aren't all these things basically nothing more than fancy ISO files?
But maybe you and I are both thinking too low level. "High level" would be dealing with what is *on* the virtual machines, not the images themselves. Then you are talking things like IP configuration, where crap is on the disk, etc...
Or maybe I'm just full of it. But I was surprised that nobody has offered a way to suck these things into VMWare Workstation.
The HTTP-Referer isn't designed for ?ref=somesource
Your stat software wants to know if more people click to your page through the logo ?ref=mylogo or through a link in the story ?ref=story. The Referer can't give you that info.
The HTTP-Referer also is no good for aggregation. It only give you a URL. If you didn't append something like ?campaign=longurl, it would be almost impossible to track things like ad-campaigns.
HTTP-Referers *are* good for dealing with myspace image leeches. If you haven't I suggest you read thorough you log files right now--I bet you'll find 20% of your traffic is myspace idiots leeching your images. Redirect those guys to something more... tasteful, and enjoy the bandwidth savings.
...except they aren't using mod_gzip/deflate. At first I thought you browsed the web RMS style and maybe wc* didn't support compression** and you were just getting what you deserved***, but then I checked in firefox and lo and behold:
Response Headers - http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/wgtgameblog0301/
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:39:54 GMT
Server: Apache
P3P: policyref="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="CAO DSP COR CURa ADMa DEVa TAIa PSAa PSDa CONi OUR NOR IND PHY ONL UNI COM NAV INT DEM STA PRE"
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html
200 OK
No compression!
If they had been using compression, it would have made all that whitespace fairly negligible.
Probably a result of how their template system stitches everything together. Still, that is pretty bad. There is no excuse to run a webserver and not turn on compression. It is the single biggest way to boost page-load and decrease bandwidth.
* wget 4 lyfe!
** compression is probably evil and Anti-Freedom(tm) somehow, kinda like images are evil or fads like "graphical user interfaces" are evil. In otherwords,anything that makes things easier or faster for a user is basically evil and Anti-Freedom****.
*** braindead comment spamming bots are the only thing not using compression (except RMS, probably)
**** I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to deduce if I'm serious. Hint: no hint.
The odds of your unactivated card falling into the hands of somebody who has the ability to modify the Caller ID info is most likely pretty slim.
And having a card fall into the hands of somebody spoofing Caller ID to activate them means said person is doing some serious criminal shit. In other words, having the card activated is the least of anybody's worry.
In other words, security is a balance. Activating your card from a "home phone" just weeds out casual criminals who stumble on your mail--not hard-core people doing this shit for a living.
Rule number one of electronic communication: never send any while angry. Always calm down first.
Honestly, I always thought of "previews" and stuff as a cop-out way to avoid the trouble of implementing a 30-minute edit feature.
In theory, I could preview the post I'm about to make, but in truth, I'll just blast right through it.
Besides, previews and "reading the entire email before sending" doesn't catch the same kinds of errors as reading it after a minute or so. After you forget about writing it, your brain can spot mistakes easier.
But yeah, for the super-ultra-important email? Read it once through. Anything else? Honestly they are going to skim the email just as quickly...nobody reads more than a few sentences of most emails anyway.
Mind explaining this rule a bit? I'm sure I could figure it out, but it would be sweet to have it documented for the world.
Because they don't want a bunch of damn tourists driving by that location every day taking pictures on their i-Androids and "tweeting" all their idiot friends on Buttbook (Facebook 2.0). You could just see the insipid blog posts now:
Once you get the geek tourists, you get the geek signatures, you get geek idiots trying to help out, you get the pedantic geek idiots trying to outsmart them, and you get armchair geek idiots trying to act chummy with the hosts of the show.
Basically, if they gave the location of where they did this stuff, it would become too infested with geek idiots to ever use it again.
According to my BOFH calendar, the shattered windows were caused by cosmic rays.
Is the person responsible going to pull a classic political step-down where they resign "in order to spend more time with their family"?
Maybe it was Hans Reiser? Sure the guy is locked up in San Quentin, but nobody knows how to hack a filesystem to bits better than Reiser. Bada ba ching! Thank you, thank you... I'll be here all night.
Actually, you are wrong. In the United States, asking the following types questions of a candidate are illegal:
"When did you graduate from high school?" (legal "are you over 18?")
"What is your native language?" ("Are you authorized to work in the US" is okay)
"Are you married?", "Do you have any children?"
"Are you a member of the Illuminati?"
"What is your weight?" (legal: "can you lift 40 pounds?)
"Have you ever had a heart attack?" (this is a grey area though--think airline pilots, etc)
"Ever been arrested?" (legal: "Ever been convicted of money laundering", and you are applying to be an accountant)
"Did you serve in Vietnam?"
(USATODAY)
Know your rights--keep in mind you may have more depending on the state you live in.
Know that people aren't always aware they can't ask these kinds of questions. You are also free to disclose any of it, like your age, even if they don't ask (many people disclose their age on their resume and don't even realize it. Never add the date when you graduated from high school.)
The key here is that if an employer bases their hiring decision on the fact you served in Vietnam, they are in the wrong. If they didn't hire you as a programmer because you are 45, they are wrong. If they didn't hire you as some hot-shot because you have kids, they are wrong.
To obtain a special dialing wand, please mash the keypad with your palm now.
If you are gonna quote, quote it right! The on-topic variation, of course is:
And yes, this is the first thing I thought of too.
Gzip/Deflate only do so much man. Minifying your javascript also shrinks down variable names, removes spaces... Minify + Gzip/Deflate Gzip/Deflate only
OpenBSD mailing list
The guy is basically a throwback to the "good old days" of computing, and quite frankly, his actions make me think he wishes we'd all go back in time with him.